Ready for a headache?

Amityville: The Awakening is both a direct sequel to The Amityville Horror and a metafilm that takes places in our world, so it recognizes the 1979 film, its 2005 remake and the sequels from 1982 to 1996 as fiction.

Much like Radio, you don’t have to choose between the strawberry or apple pie. You can have both.

Once upon a time, this movie was originally going to be made as Amityville: The Lost Tapes by  Dimension Films and Blumhouse Productions. Casey La Scala (whose Amityville 1974 is in pre-production) and Daniel Farrands (oh no — the director of The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and The Amityville Murders) were to write the script, which was about a female news intern leading a team of journalists, priests and paranormal experts into the house at 112 Ocean Avenue.

Franck Khalfoun (the remake of Maniac, P2 and eventually, the film that you’re reading about) was going to direct the movie before delay after delay struck the production. Khalfoun is a go-getter, though, and emerged with a new story and screenplay.

Originally scheduled for January of 2015, the movie kept getting pushed back further and further. Perhaps the Weinstein controversy had something to do with that, as soon Dimension was no longer involved. Well, at least in the U.S., where Harvey Weinstein’s executive producer credit was removed.

Test screeners came and went, a summer 2017 date was bandied about and then that faded away too. Finally, the film played in select theaters — ten of them, to be exact, making $724 — and then appeared for free on Google Play.

This is probably the best Amityville movie I’ve seen since the 1990’s Canadian made-for-video sequels. I wish this was great praise, but if you’ve seen the other films in this — well, saga is too nice of a word — then you know that it’s kind of a left-handed compliment.

Jennifer Jason Leigh is in this movie. In an Amityville movie! How does this happen? And she doesn’t get much to do other than be the grieving mother of a brain-dead son who she desperately wants to come back to life. Well, he does. And he can think Ron DeFeo for it. Actually, she does have one cool moment where she admits that she gave up on God and moved to the house hoping the demons there would bring her son back to her.

Cameron Monaghan plays the coma victim son, while Bella Thorne — who would hate that I would refer to her as a former Disney channel star, so let’s just say she was in Assassination Nation — plays the heroine, Belle.

Thomas Mann Jr. plays the geeky high school guy who knows just about everything there is to know about the house and the movies made about it. And hey — there’s Kurtwood Smith as a doctor for about, oh, two minutes.

It’s halfway decent, which makes it I guess the Return of the Jedi of Amityville films — the original being A New Home and Amityville II: The Possession being Empire. The rest of the films only wish they had Jar Jar in them.